Kindle Notes & Highlights
As Baldwin would later put it, “I read my way through two libraries by the time I was thirteen. I read myself out of Harlem.”
“Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one’s beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.” —James Baldwin
remarking, “Not many of us. Most of us know in a vague way that the Dutch lived in Harlem ‘a long time ago,’ and let it go at that. We don’t think about how the Indians were driven out, how the Dutch and English fought, or how finally Harlem grew into what it is today.”
this vibrancy. As Baldwin described it, “I walked into music. I had grown up with music, but now, on Beauford’s small black record player, I began to hear what I had never dared or been able to hear.”
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” —James Baldwin
Of his time working in Jersey, Baldwin would later reflect, “I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes one’s skin caused in other people.”
“My life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.”
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” —James Baldwin
“It is true that the more one learns, the less one knows.” —James Baldwin
“Perhaps the turning point in one’s life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one.” —James Baldwin
For the French, someone like James Baldwin—an American from the West—was a rare, almost exotic find.
“No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.” —James Baldwin
but his experience overseas had opened his eyes to realize that much of the oppression and dysfunction he had grown up thinking was a product of America was much more a universal flaw of humankind. He had witnessed the French mistreating North Africans just as badly as the NYPD treated him back in the States.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” —James Baldwin
Baldwin argued that “American Negroes had not been hated as long as they were slaves; they began to be hated when they were slaves no longer. And the French did not hate Algerians ten years ago. They scarcely knew that Algerians existed. But they are beginning to hate them now.”
Baldwin then further observed how the European powers were so quick to subdue and colonize big chunks of the planet but then found themselves getting uneasy when the very people they colonized decided to relocate to their own European capitals.
He saw Reagan as an aggressive perpetuator of American imperialism cloaked with the kind of religious conservativism that Baldwin loathed.
